Deagol, glad to hear it's a nice looking book and it sounds like you are pleased with it. Would be very interested in seeing a photo if you get a chance (but understand real life can get in the way of such things!).

Deagol, can you speak to the color of the book? Is it very close to the picture released by HC, or is it like the Super Deluxe CoH, where the photo made the clamshell look black when it was actually blue? I am hoping for it to be close to the color in the photo, which seems to resemble the color of the 1998 Signed Deluxe Silmarillion.

Also, did you say you ordered on 20-May, at around 10:00AM? I was about 16 hours after that, so I am guessing that I should be somewhere in the 50 to 70 range(?), seeing as how you got #30.

I have only seen one small pic of the clamshell. In hand it looks a little lighter - chestnut brown I would say. Like CoH the clamshell is a heavier duty leather of a different colour to the book - but the colour difference is more marked with this new deluxe edition. The book itself it bound in a mid-brown leather which is very soft, so we will have to handle this book carefully!The clamshell has a lift up shelf on a ribbon to make extracting the book a little easier, but I am unwilling to tug on it just in case it isn't 100% solid... Unlike CoH, the page corners have been rounded off to approximate the round corners of the binding.

Links to a few quick snaps below. Apologies for the quality. The colours are lightened a little by the flash.

Thanks for the pictures. I'm really glad they retained the curved corners on the boards (as I thought they might save money by going with normal corners), although I'm not sure about the idea of having the curve on the page block itself - I assume it looks better than it sounds (Seems like an odd and pointless deviation from the CoH SD, mind).

On the durability side, I guess the softness of the leather isn't too important as these books will typically live in their traycases anyway. Sounds a bit concerning that you don't want to pull the lift-out ribbon because you are worried it might come off. Is that just good old-fashioned paranoia, or do you have cause to think it might not be strongly constructed?

I think that you got number 30 (despite being pretty quick off the mark) definitely means they sold some the day before or had some pre-paid orders that got the earlier numbers.

There are differences between the two books in book size and clamshell size, but they do look nice together. The lift out ribbon as you can see in the pictures is attached differently to COH, and I can't see how this new design is meant to work.

I ordered at about 12pm and my copy is number 73. I was also impressed with the huge box that it came in which was very well packed.